You can't beat the location: Hyde Park next to Dolce Vita, Quack's, ASTI, and Mother's. It's good if you're a UT student as there is a bus line that runs right by the front door.

Overall, I have to admit that I have really enjoyed living at this complex. The people here are nice and since the units are small they are mostly occupied by single residents. There are never parties so that kind of noise is minimal. There is other noise, however, that never ends: Behind Pronto Food Mart (which is next door) there are a few A/C compressors which are always running and loud. And there is an air compressor for the auto tire air they offer. That thing is LOUD and on almost all the time! Sometimes I can even *feel* its vibrations in my apartment.

The A/C units are always loud. They are all outside the side windows so you can constantly hear air conditioner compressors running, not to mention you can hear and feel your neighbor's unit when it runs. Add your fridge to all that noise and it is a RARE occassion that you have total silence. That, I would say, is one of the things that sucks about the place.

Here's the real downer though... since I moved in in 2002 this building has had three management companies and has been up for sale at least twice. You know what that means - people coming in and out all the time to fix the place up and to show prospective buyers the grounds. Talk about a pain in the ass! First of all, they do NOT give notice, they just come in to your place. Maintenance has left notices inside my apartment saying they were there (which was obvious otherwise). One time they had to come in to replace a bunch of outlets throughout the building. They moved ALL my stuff out of the way, which is fine, but they didn't put any of it back. They left hundreds of little wire clippings and insulation cut-offs ALL OVER my carpet... for ME TO HAVE TO CLEAN UP! Not only that, but one of the boneheads dumped a bunch of them in front of my neighbors door and didn't clean it up.

The real kicker was when I got suspicious of the maintenance guys. I had a plate of 9 fresh, home-made chocolate chip cookies sitting on my kitchen counter. When I got home that day, there were only TWO left! AND the jerks used one of MY glasses for a drink of water (I guess) and left it in my sink for ME TO CLEAN!!! Of course, I called management and told them about this.

During the same time, these same guys peed in my toilet, sprinkling on the rim, DID NOT FLUSH, and didn't put the seat back down! TWICE ON TWO SEPARATE OCCASIONS! As a single female, you can only imagine how this made me feel! I was not only horrified, but quite furious.

Shortly after that, I installed a web cam and monitored my apartment from work. The only thing I caught on that were the sales people who brought potential buyers in to look at the property. Had I not caught them on camera, I would not have known they were there. They did not leave a card or anything.

Recently, there has been a rash of apartment renter companies putting their signs in the front and bringing people into our apartments to show them. At the time there were FOUR units UNOCCUPIED and I got a knock on my door from some dude who said, "Yeah, I heard your apartment lease is ending this month and we wanna come look at the place." He said he was with Campus and Central Properties (current mgmt co.) but he had no ID or anything. I told him, "Hell no. Go show the empty ones. There are four of them." A day or two later I was on the phone with the manager telling her that these people had been leaving the doors to the unoccupied units wide open with a/c on when I bent down and picked up a water bottle cap from the middle of my floor... IT WASN'T MINE! And I had just cleaned my place the day before. It had a Pronto price tag on it and I have never bought water at Pronto. I know for a fact that it wasn't mine. So as I realized this it also hit me that someone was in my place without notice and WITHOUT LEAVING A NOTE TO SAY THEY WERE THERE. That breached my lease agreement and I told the manager that because she was still on the phone with me at the time it happened.

I have never been late with rent and I am a very concienscious neighbor and most neighbors I've had there have been the same. It's a real shame that good people get treated so poorly by these "management" companies all the time. It really makes you wonder what's going on. I don't trust the maintenance guys as far as I could throw one of them.

But even with all that, for whatever reasons I still love the place. Maybe it's the location, maybe it's the people in the neighborhood (except for the homeless guys who've recently adopted the back of Pronto as their bathroom and hang-out, smoking, drinking place), but I've been there three years and will probably stay one more, or at least until I get a raise in salary.

User Responses
From: anonymousyoso	Date: 09/10/2006
That's so true. And now they're trying to jack up the rent 20%. TWENTY PERCENT! They say it's for "fair market value" but that's just a poor excuse. The building is over 30 years old, has aluminum wiring, is crumbling away in parts, has unfinished work in other spots, has a constantly leaky roof, sits RIGHT NEXT TO a GAS STATION so you can smell the fumes every time a delivery truck comes. The dumpster is always full because the several hundred people from Duval Villas use it, too (they're not supposed to). Trash piles up all AROUND the dumpster almost every week. People from Duval Villas are constantly parking in the Act VII parking lot, making it sometimes hard to find a space. And people who are going to the Pronto Food Mart next door (the gas station) seem to think that the Act VII parking lot is also the Pronto parking lot. There are vagrants on the lot all the time. There is a constant barrage of graffiti on EVERYTHING all the time. Fair market value? HAHA! That's bulls#!t. This place is a total dump at times. And technically, it's not even in Hyde Park! It's just outside the Hyde Park boundary. Why they would want to force their good tennants to move out by raising the rent is beyond me.

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